Mrs. Harju’s Classroom Blog

The children had a great time at Uno’s today. They were wonderfully behaved and polite throughout the trip. The bus ride was comfortable - high soft seats! At Uno’s each child created his or her own pizza, enjoyed way too much soda, nibbled on some french fries and saw the kitchen area of Uno’s. They have an enormous refridgerator (it could hold enough ice cream for a year!) and they make a lot of pizza - As many as 600 in one day. (The second graders could probably eat almost that much.) Everyone enjoyed eating the pizza they created and chatting with each other and with our great waitress, Jess. It was a wonderful way to celebrate the children’s amazing reading achievement. We again thank Ms. Dolan for arranging the trip for us.

We did do some work when we arrived back at school. Last week we wrote our own version of the Dr. Suess story, A Wocket in My Pocket, and today we each illustrated our line from the poem and rewrote our line. The new poem and illustrations are displayed outside of our classroom. We also worked on place value in math and listened as Mrs. Harju read about Pippi Longstocking.

We are thrilled to have everyone in the class past the 100 AR point level. Our celebration will be at Uno’s (Thank you Ms. Dolan!) next week Tuesday. The children will make their own pizza, get a tour of the restaurant, enjoy beverages while we wait for our pizza and Eat Great Pizza! We have worked very hard to get to this level and all of the students are excited to have this wonderful opportunity to celebrate.

The children arrived excited to learn (well actually they didn’t care for the let’s get to work welcome that I gave them!) We tried something new today that I called 4 Corners. The children have 4 kinds of activities to choose, with two assignments in each category. They could work on what they wanted first and choose partners when needed. They especially enjoyed the two poetry activities. The children had to choose a poem, practice reading it, and have someone else video tape them reciting it. We were able to watch a few of the videos later in the day and learned a few things. We also had a few bloopers — a few people didn’t know they had left the video camera on and one camera person made us a little seasick with the back and forth motion! We will work on these activities more Tuesday.